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Humble Bundle: PC and Android 10 Review

METAL SLUG 3 BTA Review:

METAL SLUG 3 is a side-scrolling shooter meant to return us to the heyday of arcades. It even asks about inserting coins and uses coins to purchase continues. The graphics are also designed to invoke memories of what games use to offer us.

The gameplay is largely simple and intuitive, especially for general combat, but there are definitely some places where it falls apart. The best example would have to be where the game tells you to go into something. There are two of these in the first level and I have no idea how to actually interact with these objects. I have run into them, pressed buttons when on top of them, and nothing. Also I have not been able to figure out how to actually control the height level I am playing at. Even though you can duck, there is no apparent means to fall through the floor, like in many other games. When I came to a fork letting me go up or down, I had to actually crawl on my knees for a ways to take the lower path.

The boss battles also have issues, especially the first one when a monster crab with guns is chasing after you. Probably the biggest problem with it is the crab's ability to out run you, so if you stop running, like to shoot or throw grenades, it has a chance of running up and killing you before you can react. Though not in the same way, this is also an issue with the second boss.

Another odd issue is the complete lack of health information for you and bosses. It would really be useful to know just how close things are to dying, especially yourself. I have noticed on multiple occasions that you are able to survive multiple hits of some kind, but I do not know how many hits or what hits specifically will kill you in one shot.

On Android the controls are just bad. There really is no other way to put it. The control buttons are just far enough apart that you cannot roll your thumb over, triggering a jump without letting go of the fire button. You can change where they are positioned, but not by much. You also cannot change their size.

The virtual joystick is just horrible in two ways. One is that it has a nice and big deadzone in the middle of it, which prevents you from quickly changing direction, so you can be running away, and quickly shoot back at what is chasing you. Also, why is it even a joystick? There is no use for the ordinal directions, so why not just use a directional pad, and maybe shrink it down to have a smaller deadzone? That deadzone definitely killed me a few times.

The controls on PC are better, thanks to the nature of keyboards, but the PC version is not perfect. You are given resolution options, so I increased them to have a larger window to look at. This resulted in the image blurring because the graphics were just being scaled up to fill the window. Blurry text is never pleasant to look at.

Is METAL SLUG 3 a game to get the bundle for? Not in my opinion. I do not doubt that there are some people out there that may enjoy it immensely, but I am not one of them. There are just too many issues that prevent me from having fun with it.